In the middle of the afternoon of May 28, Susannah Eliott, CEO of the Australian Science Media Center, went to have her hair done. That evening, Eliott was participating in a press conference the Queen of England was going to attend; Eliott spent much of the day worrying about whether to curtsy.
The press conference was going to be a virtual affair, with paleontologists John Long and Kate Trinajstic and imaging expert Tim Senden sitting in Adelaide to talk about the remarkable fish fossil they'd found, along with Robyn Williams, Australia's best known science broadcaster. Most of the journalists and the Queen, were, unusually, going to be at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, in central London, where Her Majesty was getting a tour.
Long and his colleagues had recently discovered a fossil placoderm, an extinct species of armored fish, preserved complete with embryo and umbilical cord inside, at ...
